In an ordinary neighborhood, a team of engineers are developing a robot they call Praha, who looks like an ordinary human high school girl. Chika, a 4-year-old girl who lives next door, meets her neighbor and learns her secret. The two girls become friends and high school classmates, and Chika teaches Hiro—as she calls Praha—about human emotions, including love.

While I've seen many attempts to approach the theme of whether computers can have emotions, this is one of the best. This manga does well from several angles. As expected from Nishi-sensei, the art and story-telling are well-done and fitting. Then there's the theme, which she addresses masterfully. Other stories I've read on this theme run into a lot of problems, especially since they usually depend on emotions popping out of the void. In Tonari no Robot, Nishi-sensei notably avoids this pitfall entirely, by four means, allowing her to properly address the theme. First, the robot in question is the most flexibly programmed of several androids capable of learning. Second, emotions are not some unexplainable occurrence (nor are they completely chemical) nor do they come in the same form in androids as in humans, this is discussed multiple times. Third, love is not the only emotion discussed, but also mourning, allowing emotions to be discussed as a whole. Finally, parallels are made between human emotions and relationships and the ones the android in question is involved with. Thanks to these four factors, Nishi-sensei focuses closely on the possible capacity of a robot to learn and feel, and how said robot interacts with humans and other robots. She never strays from this theme either, while thankfully not neglecting the human characters, male and female alike. The result is extremely compelling, and would be more so if one important chapter did not end with such confusion (my sole complaint). (Side note, as is noted at the end of the volume, the names of the robot models come from places in the Czech Republic (or Czechia), where the term "robot" comes from. "Praha" is Czech for its capital, Prague, by the way.)